Female slaves were sexual victims in Île Royale

By Ken Donovan

(Historian Ken Donovan, president of the Old Sydney Society, gave a talk at the Feb. 28 meeting of the society that was based on a paper that he will be publish later this year on the subject of female slaves as sexual victims in Cape Breton in the days of French rule of the island.

Charlene (Missy) Kirton, a Cape Bretoner and Park Canada interpreter, portrays Marie Marguerite Rose, an enslaved woman who eventually was freed in Louisbourg after 19 years slavery. In 1738, at the age of 21, Marie Rose gave birth to a son, Jean Francois, who became a slave. The father was listed as “unknown” but slaves were often sexual victims of their owners.

Donovan’s paper sheds light on a dark aspect of a period of the island’s history, from about 1713-1810, where female slaves in the communities of Île Royale (Cape Breton), such as Louisbourg, Ingonish, St. Peter’s, Mira, Lorraine, Fourchu and St. Esprit, were often sexually exploited by their owners, with many of these women forced to bear a number of illegitimate children.

Donovan has allowed the Cape Breton Post to use his yet-to-be-published paper as the basis for this week’s Reflections feature.)

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Throughout human history, slavery has always been a system of power and control, and the situation was no different in the French Atlantic world of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Whether they were aboard French slave ships during the Middle Passage or labouring in the cane fields of French West Indies, female slaves were sexually assaulted by white males and men of all ethnicities, so it should come as little surprise that female slaves in Île Royale were also subject to rape and sexual harassment.

There were 70 female adult slaves in Île Royale and, like other women in service, they were vulnerable to sexual exploitation by their owners.

Since Louisbourg’s parish records survived intact from 1722-1745 and from 1749-1758, today we are able to determine the circumstances of many of the births. According to these records, Louisbourg’s illegitimacy rate of 4.5 per cent represented 101 children out of a total of 2,223 baptisms, with 12 slave women giving birth to 19.8 per cent (20 of 101) of the town’s illegitimate babies.

The parish registers for all 18 of the Île Royale outports were returned to France after the colony was taken from the French in 1745 and again in 1758 and the original, detailed parish entries were subsequently lost. There were, however, accurate, detailed summaries made of the parish records in the 19th century.

In his paper, Donovan details one of the few cases in the Île Royale archives, composed of 750,000 documents, which described a white male owner’s sexual exploitation of his female slave.

Louise was a slave who arrived in Louisbourg from Quebec during the summer of 1727, where innkeeper Jean Seigneur purchased the 25-year-old woman from Captain Pierre Dauteuil in order to use her as a servant in his inn.

By February 1728, however, Seigneur realized that Louise was eight or nine months pregnant and thus unsuitable as a servant in his establishment. Seigneur took Dauteuil to court, claiming he had purchased Louise under false pretenses.

A priest was summoned for a private discussion with Louise and learned that, on the voyage from Quebec during the summer of 1727, Louise had slept in Dauteuil’s cabin and was now expecting his child. Even through Louise was pregnant, Dauteuil sold her to Seigneur, warning her to say nothing, but promising to return for her before the birth of the baby.

Since she was a slave, Louise had little choice but to obey Dauteuil and no recourse should he fail to keep his promise. Four months after the birth, Dauteuil and Seigneur appeared before a Louisbourg notary and agreed that Louise and her baby should be sold in Martinique for 600 livres and replaced by 14-year-old Etienne, who cost 650 livres. Upon his arrival in Louisbourg, Etienne was baptized and put to work in Seigneur’s inn.

Slave women were subject to abuse even in remote and isolated communities of Île Royale. There were 31 slaves living throughout the island in such communities as Ingonish, the French Village, Mira, Lorraine, Fourchu, Rouville, St. Esprit and St. Peter’s. Of these 31 slaves, 16 were children born to 15 slave women.

Although the original parish records for most of the outports have not survived, the fishing community of St. Esprit was an exception.

Marie, a young black slave woman, lived with her owners, Jean Perre and his wife Marguerite Guyon of St. Esprit. Madeline, the first of Marie’s two children was born May 12, 1743, while a second child, Genevieve, was born on Sept. 5, 1744 but lived only seven days.

Jean Perres’ sexual abuse of Marie reflected the wide chasm of power between slave and slave owner. As was typical, few records survive about Marie and her life, except that she lived with one of the most powerful fishing and merchant families in Île Royale.

The exploitation of Marie by Jean Perre, and Louise by Pierre Dauteuil, had universal qualities that went beyond boundaries, time and space in all colonies with slaves. Female slaves had children fathered by their owners, yet the slaveowners’ families remained intact because the wives ignored their husbands’ sexual abuse of their slaves and continued the pretence that everything was fine.

Of the 277 French slaves in Île Royale, there were 70 adult females who served as domestic servants and nannies and who helped mothers cope with the stress of bearing children. Although these enslaved women assisted young mothers, they were vulnerable to sexual assault, with 36 of the 70 slave women bearing 48 illegitimate children. The names of the mothers and the children have been identified. This makes for powerful, historical information, usually referred to as primary data.

Skin colour did not matter in terms of the white male’s sexual desires. Slave life in Île Royale was shaped by the history and culture of the island, yet it also reflected the lives of slaves throughout the French Atlantic world where racism and slavery went hand in hand.

The wives in Île Royale and other French slave colonies looked the other way and preserved harmony within their families, while the abuse of slave women continued unabated.

Charlene (Missy) Kirton, a Cape Bretoner and Park Canada interpreter, portrays Marie Marguerite Rose, an enslaved woman who eventually was freed in Louisbourg after 19 years slavery. In 1738, at the age of 21, Marie Rose gave birth to a son, Jean Francois, who became a slave. The father was listed as “unknown” but slaves were often sexual victims of their owners.